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Comment by iefbr14 | Hacker News Reader

Fish eggs often travel long distances by sticking to the feathers or legs of waterfowl I have been told at school long ago.

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Close, I looked it up out of curiosity, it seems Waterfowl eat the eggs, but they travel through their digestive system fully alive. Really interesting even so!

I can see how the evolutionary advantage of such hardened eggs would be huge!

Right, as long as you can still get out.

I would think that would lead to a lot of inbred fish

a high rate of mutations would be an advantage in a new environment, though.

If it happened just once, yes.

This tends to simply not be that much of a problem for "lower" species.

Evolved so they *only* hatch after passing through the digestive system of a waterfowl might be a good evolutionary trick to avoid inbreeding.

Your eggs won't hatch until they're well away from your relatives.

In my experience, inbreeding doesn't seem to bother fish very much. Certainly you don't want it to happen too much, but I have several species of fish that have inbred and they look fantastic. I'm sure if I continued this line with absolutely no introduction of new genetics, some problems could arise... But after a few generations, they're doing great.

I will add new genetics to the line soon, for what it's worth. It isn't an experiment to see what will happen. In most cases I never expected them to breed to begin with.

I’ve wondered if natural phenomena like tornadoes could carry fish eggs those kinds of distances. Or even just carry the eggs into the clouds, to be rained down large distances away.

Fish falls or fafrotskies are well documented, and have been filmed. A weird phenomenon, but very real.

The animals dropped tend to be fish or frogs.

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